Utopian Literature and Science: From the Scientific Revolution to Brave New World and Beyond

227 Pages·2015·2.24 MB·English

by  Patrick Parrinder (auth.)

Utopian Literature and Science
Also by Patrick Parrinder:
AUTHORS AND AUTHORITY
H. G. WELLS: The Critical Heritage (ed.)
JAMES JOYCE
LEARNING FROM OTHER WORLDS (ed.)
NATION AND NOVEL
NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE HISTORY OF THE NOVEL (ed.)
THE REINVENTION OF THE BRITISH AND IRISH NOVEL 1880–1940 (ed.)
SCIENCE FICTION: A Critical Guide (ed.)
SCIENCE FICTION: Its Criticism and Teaching
SHADOWS OF THE FUTURE
Utopian Literature and
Science
From the Scientific Revolution to Brave
New Worldd and Beyond
Patrick Parrinder
Emeritus Professor of English,University of Reading, UK
© Patrick Parrinder 2015
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-45677-9
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First published 2015 by
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DOI 10.1057/9781137456786
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Parrinder, Patrick, 1944–
Utopian literature and science : from the scientific revolution to Brave New World and
beyond / Patrick Parrinder, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Reading, UK.
pages cm
Summary: “Scientific progress is usually seen as a precondition of modern utopias, but
science and utopia are frequently at odds. Utopian Literature and Science traces the
interactions of sciences such as astronomy, microscopy, genetics and anthropology
with 19th- and 20th-century utopian and dystopian writing and modern science fiction.
Ranging from Galileo’s observations with the telescope to current ideas of the post-
human and the human-animal boundary, the author’s re-examination of key literary
texts brings a fresh perspective to the paradoxes of utopian thinking since Plato. This
book is essential reading for teachers and students of literature and science studies,
utopian studies, and science fiction studies, as well as students of 19th and early
20th-century literature more generally”– Provided by publisher.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Literature and science. 2. Utopias in literature. 3. Science fiction–History and
criticism. I. Title.
PN55.P37 2015
809’.93356—dc23
2015012635
Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.
Contents
Preface vi
Acknowledgements ix
1 Introduction 1
Part I Sciences of Observation and Intervention
2 Beyond the Telescope: From Astronomy to
(Dystopian) Fiction 23
3 A Sylph under the Microscope: Science and Romance 37
4 Satanism and Genetics: Haldane’sDaedalus and Its Begetters 51
Part II The Human Animal
5 Eugenics, Utopia, Eudemonics: Bellamy, Galton and Morris 67
6 Strains of the Non-Human:The Coming Race, Erewhon,
A Crystal Age 82
7 Gorilla Warfare: Darwin, Freud and the Stone Age Romance 97
8 From Human to Animal: Wells and Kafka 113
Part III Modern Utopias and Post-Human Worlds
9 War Is Peace: Conscription and Mobilisation in
the Modern Utopia 129
10 Towards the Singularity? Cˇapek’s R.U.R. and Its Times 147
11 Olaf Stapledon and the Shape of Things to Come 160
12 The Expulsion of the Poets 175
Notes 189
Bibliography of Secondary Sources 209
Index 215
v
Preface
Utopia has many different facets. It may be understood as a political
blueprint, a philosophical thought experiment, a design for social living
or a vision of individual contentment and harmony; and it is always,
to a greater or lesser degree, an indictment of our society’s wastefulness,
confusion and ignorance of where it is going. Utopias and anti-utopias
can and often do play a significant part in the study of politics, ethics,
sociology, social psychology, intellectual history and even architecture.
There is a danger in these approaches of losing sight of the fact that the
vast majority of utopias are written texts, and usually works of narrative
fiction. The emphasis in this book is on utopia as a literary genre – very
often, the ‘utopian romance’ – and its relations with neighbouring gen-
res such as science fiction and scientific romance. My interest thus dif-
fers to some extent from that of the historians and social scientists who
have added so much to our understanding of utopias and utopianism
in the last thirty years, but I have learned a great deal from listening to
them in the interdisciplinary conversation that is utopian studies.
As for science, I first became aware of its history, literature and con-
temporary politics as a sixth-former specialising (with very little idea as
to why I was specialising) in maths, physics and chemistry more than
half a century ago. At the height of the ‘two cultures’ debate in the
early 1960s I turned down a university place in science. As an English
student at Cambridge I was amazed to discover that – of the two novel-
ists whom I had read and reread at the age of thirteen or fourteen – the
scientifically minded H.G. Wells was still roundly despised by the criti-
cal establishment, while the comedian Mark Twain was celebrated as a
classic of American literature. All this – together with my upbringing in
London and north-west Kent – led to a lifelong commitment to Wells
study and scholarship. My first short book on Wells (in 1970) had no
discernible impact except that, much to my surprise, it was noticed by
a few people who then were pioneering the academic study of science
fiction. I had never been a teenage ‘fan’, but by the late 1970s I was
privileged to teach undergraduate courses in science fiction – long
before it was possible to do so in Britain – at universities in Canada and
the United States. My guide and mentor in this was Darko Suvin, to
whose generosity and erudition I owe a very great debt, closely followed
by his Montreal colleagues Bob Philmus and David Ketterer. Among
vi
Preface vii
others who welcomed me and eased my passage into the fraternity of
‘sf studies’ I would think particularly of Brian Aldiss, John Clute, David
Lake, Ursula Le Guin, Dale Mullen, Scott Sanders, George Slusser and
Tom Shippey; and, slightly later, Denise Terrel, Marleen Barr, Robert
Crossley, John Dean, Carlo Pagetti and Mark Rose. Since science fiction
became an academic subject in Britain I have been particularly lucky
in the opportunities I have had to work with Stephen Baxter, Mark
Bould, Edward James, Farah Mendlesohn, Andy Sawyer and David Seed.
I owe special thanks to David for commissioning the original version of
Chapter 9, and to Bob Crossley for sharing his unrivalled knowledge of
Stapledon with me, and for his comments and suggestions on an earlier
version of Chapter 11.
My introduction to the then very new field of utopian studies came
in 1983 when I was invited to a Colston Research Symposium at the
University of Bristol. It was memorable, not least because our two or
three days discussing utopianism ended in a flaming row between two
of the main participants at the final public session. (Has the irony of
this unduly coloured my subsequent readings of utopia and dystopia?
I hope not.) For their stimulus and comradeship at that time and since
I am grateful to Ruth Levitas, Gregory Claeys, Vincent Geoghegan,
Krishan Kumar, Tom Moylan, Lyman Tower Sargent, Fátima Vieira and
many others. In addition, I wish to thank the individuals and institu-
tions who prompted me into writing specific chapters of this book,
and in many cases provided critical audiences for earlier versions:
Richard Dunn and the National Maritime Museum for Chapter 2;
Max Saunders, and John Holmes and the British Society for Literature
and Science for Chapter 4; Pat Wheeler for Chapters 6 and 11; Károly
Pintér and Pázmány Péter Catholic University for Chapter 8; Andrzej
Gas̹iorek and Nathan Waddell for Chapter 9; Kelvin Long and the
British Interplanetary Society (www.bis-space.com) for Chapter 11. In
addition, a surprising amount of the material that follows was originally
conceived for, and first tried out on, academic trips to Italy, that land of
wit, beauty and hospitality on the other side of the Alps celebrated by
Samuel Butler and so many other English writers. My thanks are due,
first and foremost, to Maria Teresa Chialant; to Eleonora Rao; to Vita
Fortunati and her colleagues at the Research Centre for the Study of
Utopia, University of Bologna; to Paola Spinozzi; to Daniela Carpi; and
to Bruna Mancini, Carlo Pagetti, Oriana Palusci, Nicoletta Vallorani, the
late Romolo Runcini and others.
My research on Wells and his historical context led inevitably to a
period specialisation, initially focusing on the so-called transitional age
viii Preface
of British literature between 1880 and 1920, but eventually covering
the whole of Wells’s lifetime (he died in 1946). This is reflected in the
timespan of the present book, in which Wells is always in the back-
ground (and occasionally, notably in Chapter 8 and the closing pages
of Chapter 12, in the foreground). Among the many colleagues and
friends with whom I have discussed Wells and his contemporaries over
the years, some have made a special contribution to my thinking about
utopia and science. Here (in addition to those named above) I would
particularly thank Bill Greenslade, Sylvia Hardy, John Hammond, John
Huntington, Simon James, John S. Partington, Chris Rolfe and Michael
Sherborne. I also owe a very great deal to the inspiration of scholars
and Wellsians no longer with us, including Bernard Crick, Michael Foot,
Frank McConnell, Nicholas Salmon, George Slusser, David Smith, Leon
Stover, Charles Swann, Warren Wagar and Raymond Williams.
Finally, my thanks go to Ben Doyle, Sophie Ainscough, Tomas Rene
and Linda Auld at Palgrave Macmillan, to Monika for her cover design,
and to the rest of my family and above all to Jenny for the love, sup-
port and good sense which enable one to think that a utopia might
be possible.
P.P.
Acknowledgements
Although everything in this book has been extensively revised and
rewritten, earlier versions of the material have appeared as follows. In
each case I am grateful to the publishers for permission to reprint: for
Chapter 4, ‘Satanism and Genetics’ in P. Spinozzi and B. Hurwitz (eds),
Discourses and Narrations in the Biosciences (Go˝ t tingen: V & R Unipress,
2011), pp. 247–58; Chapter 5, ‘Eugenics and Utopia’, Utopian Studies 8.2
(1997), 1–12; Chapter 6, ‘Entering Dystopia, Entering Erewhon’, Critical
Survey 17.1 (2005), 6–21; Chapter 7, ‘From Eden to Oedipus: Darwin,
Freud, and the Romance of the Stone Age’, Anglistik 15.1 (2004), 83–91;
Chapter 9, ‘War is Peace’ in D. Seed (ed.), Future Wars: The Anticipations
and the Fears (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), pp. 50–65;
Chapter 10, ‘Robots, Clones, and Clockwork Men’, Interdisciplinary
Science Reviews 34.1 (2009), 57–68; Chapter 11, ‘The Earth is my
Footstool’, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 65.1 (2012), 20–24;
Chapter 12, ‘The Expulsion of the Poets’, in D. Carpi (ed.), Why Plato?
(Heidelberg: Winter, 2005), pp. 69–77.
ix